Psychic Welfare

On their third stuido album, Philadelphia's Pink Skull add more members and more songs with vocals, but skimp on the Led Zeppelin jokes.

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when Philadelphia's Pink Skull seemed to be developing their own hybrid of club-music precision and alt-rock sensibility, a sort of parallel to what the DFA bands were working up in New York. The duo of Julian Grefe and Justin Geller had finely honed senses of rhythm, tone, and humor from the get-go; they didn't resort to words very often, but when they did, they were pretty funny. (The previous two Pink Skull albums were called Endless Bummer and Zeppelin 3-- both classic-rock references, notably.)

Grefe and Geller added a guitarist, bassist, and drummer to the group's lineup a few years back (whereupon they became a solid live band), and they've thrown in a few more band members for Psychic Welfare. Somehow, though, a lot of their virtues have fallen away. There's nothing here with a beat as crisp and vigorous as Zeppelin's "Gonzo's Cointreau"-- another Zep joke!-- or Bummer's "Ritualistic Bug Use". Nothing here clocks in at more than four-and-a-half minutes; none of these grooves could sustain themselves for much longer. (Of the 13 tracks, four are esssentially single-idea interludes.)

The most dubious change Pink Skull have undergone, though, is focusing much more on songs with vocals, which have never been their strong point. Grefe's not a particularly charismatic or compelling or assertive singer, and he doesn't have a lot to say lyrically, so his voice ends up being the least distinctive but most omnipresent tone on the album-- the equivalent of an overused keyboard preset from a band that would never otherwise dream of overusing a keyboard preset. "Hot Bubblegum" starts as a cute musical paraphrase of ABC's old synth-pop single "Be Near Me", but Grefe's tuneless, why-am-I-doing-this vocal performance ("Hot bubblegum/ Hot bubblegum/ Hot bubblegum/ Hot bubblegum/ Hot bubblegum/ It's all over me") keeps it from going anywhere.

Pink Skull's gift for texture is inalienable: This isn't much of a dance record, but it's pretty neat as a headphone record. That's especially true of the one genuinely terrific song here, the dissonant instrumental stomp "Bee Nose", whose creepy, sidling synths come off like curdled Boards of Canada. Even the lesser tracks have cool little details in their arrangements, though, like the doubled bass lurch that drags "Janine Aubergine" across its foursquare snare-snap or the airy saxophone solo that pulls "Mu" together and explicitly recalls the way Ultramarine records toyed with prog-rock in the early 1990s.

Still, this is a retreat from a group that was once much weirder and brasher. Where they used to feed both the hips and the head, this time they're settling for distracted pop songwriting and tone without groove. They're taking themselves more seriously than they ever have before, but what used to make them a pleasure to listen to was that they took nothing except their craft seriously.